


Novels and Navigations

by DaisyNinjaGirl



Category: A Civil Contract - Georgette Heyer, HEYER Georgette - Works, Persuasion - Jane Austen
Genre: Domestic Ever After, F/M, Jam, Novel reading, family matters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 02:36:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17013972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaisyNinjaGirl/pseuds/DaisyNinjaGirl
Summary: In which Adam and Jenny read a novel. There’s always your first time.





	Novels and Navigations

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MadameHardy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MadameHardy/gifts).



It was a bitter cold winter’s day when Adam and Jenny returned to London.

Too early for snow as yet, the rain sleeted down and covered the cobbled roads in dirty pools, the heavy darkness of coal fogs and winter sunsets filling Grosvenor Street with a thick gloom despite the early hour of the afternoon.  Jenny climbed out of the coach, gingerly placing her feet and worrying about slipping on the wet stones, as she never cared to in her blessed home in the fens.

“I know you don’t like it,” Adam said companionably, “but they are opening Parliament in January this year, so after our business is complete I can take you back to Fontley in time for Christmas.”

Jenny shot him a wry look, but gathered her skirts and let their butler, who had travelled on ahead, open the front door of her house to her.  The candles were lit, and the fires, and Adam noticed with pleasure that the parcel he had commissioned Lady Oversley to procure for him was sitting on a table in the parlour waiting for a body to crack open and enjoy.  He let his small treat savour in his thoughts while he and his wife went through the busy nothings of overcoats and greeting the London servants, and had been settled into a light dinner and a quiet evening by the fire.

When they had done so, and Jenny had arranged the pots for their evening tea and herself into her armchair in a comfortable cose, Adam presented the paper wrapped package to his wife.  “Before you fall asleep,” he said with a smile.

“What’s this?” she asked, tugging at the strings.

“Oversley has a friend in the publishing trade,” Adam told her.  “I had mentioned to him there were some novels you had a particular fondness for, and Lady Oversley told me there was to be a new one.  She asked a favour of the printers for an edition from the first printing, and so to you an early Christmas present.”  He felt a small smile twitch at his mouth.  “I thought perhaps it would please.” 

Jenny opened the first volume of the set with interest.  “There’s a name, they give her a name!” and then: “Oh.  Miss Austen has died, and so the family does not protect her privacy so.  How very sad.”  She proffered the volume to him, and he read the solemn words of a relative telling the life of a humble parson’s daughter with the mortifying praise that her life was of no event and: “she never deserved disapprobation, so, in the circle of her family and friends, she never met reproof.”

“Dear God,” he said, “this Miss Austen sounds as horrifyingly saintly as my sister Maria – at least the way Mama paints her.”

“I think,” Jenny told him, “that Miss Austen must have had a lot of wicked thoughts in private.  Her novels are so deliciously pointed.”

He crossed his eyes in fun at her.  “One wonders what wicked thoughts you harbour behind your own sweet demeanour…”

She flushed, but her eyes narrowed into slits and he knew she had accepted the joke.

He began the first chapter:

> _No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine.  Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition were all equally against her..._

He recounted the opening words relating the early life of a girl who was neither neglected nor poor; whose father was neither unkind nor even a little inclined to lock up his daughters.

 “This isn’t at all what I thought novels are supposed to be about.  I thought they were supposed to be all impressionable young maidens fainting at the sight of dastardly curtains and such like.”

“It’s what’s _behind_ the curtain,” Jenny said with a laugh.  “And I can only assume that young Lydia has been sharing her love of _Udolpho_ with you.  I’ve had a letter from her which you will be pleased to hear, she and Brough have made plans to arrive in London on the fifteenth.  They asked if they might stay the night instead of putting up in an hotel.”

Jenny had picked up the third of the little volumes and was leafing through it idly.  “She said that they have Julia staying with them over Christmas, by the by.  Oh, please, Adam, let us read the second novel first.  I know all about going to Bath and having to go to balls where one doesn’t have an introduction to anyone.  This one has a Captain in it.”

Adam let himself be distracted and opened the other book, this one called _Persuasion._

After he’d read the first page, he rubbed his hand over his chin; uncomfortably aware that the little baronet wrapped in his love of his family’s storied antecedents, with his resentment of new creations and the rising men of the Royal Navy, with his desperate need to be flattered into taking actions in his own self-interest; that baronet had been cast as the villain of this little bit of froth, even as he felt the same pang at the thought of his beloved ancestral home in the possession of some other family.  But he kept reading all the same.

***

“Lady Godiva might have ridden about the land in her altogether, but immodesty isn’t natural!” his wife’s maid scolded, trying to chase him out of the room.

He bowed in Martha’s direction from the arm chair he was lounging in.  “But my dear madame, the sight of my wife in a state of nature is a delight reserved only to you and myself.  It would be a shame to turn my eyes from such glory.”

Jenny, who was lying in the cloth draped oyster bath, shot him a dry glance but waited until Martha had left the room for more towels before she laughed at him.  She sighed as she shifted in the water, her rounded stomach full with their second child, her breasts full and white with purpled blue veins tracing the shape under her skin, the water easing her body, the room blessed with candle flames.  Adam was struck then, as he had been struck on their tour of Italy the year before, of how rich her little figure was.  She was a creature after her time, as was her full spirited father: they suited not the grass green stripes and crocodile legs of the New Men in this age of muslin and clean white temples, but the baroque splendour and lush bodies of the Pope’s palace in Rome, papal corruption, incense, and all. 

When Martha had eased his little Jenny out of the bath and robed her carefully in nightdress and wrapper, Adam sat behind her at the dressing table and carefully combed out her nut brown hair.

“I like your book,” he told her.  “Everyone is older and has had time for reflection.  They feel more real to me.”

In the glass, he could see Jenny smile slightly.

“A note from Sir William Knighton arrived while you were having dinner with your father,” Adam said casually, and pretended not to notice the slight flinch of her shoulders.  He gathered her hair into three swags and braided it loosely, feeling pleased at the cleverness of his hands.  “He has suggested waiting on you tomorrow morning at 11 of the clock if you should desire it.”

“I want—” she started, then stopped, her mouth twisting into a determined line.

“And then,” Adam said before he kissed her neck, “so long as the doctor is in approval, we will take you home to Fontley.”

***

Two weeks before Christmas, they were hosts to his sister, his sister’s husband, and the wife of the husband’s cousin, as the three stopped in London on the way from Bath to Adversane.  Adam had thought it a peculiar choice given Brough’s general dislike of the Marchioness of Rockhill, but he supposed that Brough’s affection for his cousin was sufficient that he would ferry poor old Julia about while the Marquis was conducting business on the continent.  Adam’s first love was as ethereal as ever, and a glow suffused the furs and rich jewels in which she dressed herself, but the soft trill of her voice had acquired a querulousness he regretted to hear, and all the fine and homely foods and softest feather beds of their Grosvenor Street house were insufficient to the matron to ease the ache in her bones from her day of travel.

She fussed about the breakfast table, trying one dish and then another, complaining after one mouthful that Rockhill liked her to care for her figure, and after another that she was dying of hunger.  Brough had hidden himself behind a newspaper and left the hardened soldier and the married women to stand the shock.

“Oh, my Lord, what is _this_?” Lydia said, picking up a heavy tome that had been half hidden beneath other books piled on the side table.  “ _Telford on Bridges_.  Adam what _have_ you been reading.  Are you letting Papa Chawleigh convince you to invest in one of his roading projects?”

“We have been reading another novel by that particular author I like,” Jenny said complacently.  “This one is a bit like _Mansfield Park_ with the navy and the baronet’s daughters, but I like the Miss Musgroves much better than the Miss Bertrams.  And Miss Anne seems much finer than Fanny Price.”

“Oh, baronets,” Julia said with a sniff.   “Not the Bon Ton, then.”

“That book!” Lydia cried.  “Mama has been sure that it is one of those Key Romances like _Glenarvon_ and there is a malignant authoress amongst her acquaintances who is making fun of her.  She has already cut Mrs Papworth on the strength of it, although of course Mrs Papworth is such a dreadful toadeater I don’t think it can be at all likely.  And there _was_ a rotten little baronet and his old maid daughter that were hanging on Mama’s sleeve last year.  She gave them a dreadful snub, although not until the end of the season because they gave such excellent card parties.”  There was one bit I liked the best, she said, enthused.  “Listen, it’s about the Admiral and the Admiral’s Wife, who are always walking about together.  Don’t you think that Mrs Croft deserves to be addressed in capital letters?”

“No,” sniffed Julia.  “I thought they were dreadfully lost to propriety and deserved to be snubbed.”

“Oh, but listen, the Admiral is about to overturn their gig because he’s only just learning to drive, so his wife takes over:

> _By coolly giving the reins a better direction herself, they happily passed the danger; and by once afterwards judiciously putting out her hand, they neither fell into a rut, nor ran foul of a dung-cart; and Anne, with some amusement at their style of driving, which she imagined no bad representation of the general guidance of their affairs, found herself safely deposited by them at the cottage._

“Brough, _you_ would let me take the reigns of your carriage if it were going to overturn would you not?”

“I would be sure to never let it get so close to disaster,” he said with a laugh, peering over his newspaper.

“Oh, pooh, you’re never any fun.  Next thing you’ll say that you would object to me being in the Trafalgar action.”

“My love, my boat, I can absolutely imagine Mrs Croft striding athwart the helm in some great storm or other, taking command while her husband is indisposed.  But I’ll be d-ed if I provide you the necessary widowhood to hitch yourself to a sailor.”

“Do you like the jam?” Jenny interrupted.  She had a contented smile as she bedecked her toast.  “We brought it with us from Fontley—I found the receipt for it in your grandmother’s household journal.”

“Is this—?”  Adam hesitated, aware that Brough had noticed his startle and was eying him with a knowledgeable twinkle.  “Is this _the_ jam?”

Jenny took a decided bite of her toast and said naught.  Adam had a sudden sense memory of the summer, of finding Jenny in the orchard of Fontley alone in that secluded spot, the heat of the day plastering the thin cotton of her gown against her neckline and back.  Afterwards, he had helped her finish collecting the ripe plums.

“I don’t know what anybody wants to do with ships, or making jam from mouldy old journals,” Julia said in a huff, as she often did when she felt ignored.  “They are for other people to deal with.  When Rockhill comes back he is going to buy me a ruby necklace, he says.”

As Jenny turned away from showing their friends to the carriage, she bit her lip and told her husband: “And they were gone, she hoped, to be happy, however oddly constructed such happiness might seem.”

“Poor old Julia,” he told her.

***

The week before Christmas, Jenny received a letter:

> _From The Reverend Dr James Blythe to Lady Lynton,_
> 
> Dear Lady Lynton,
> 
> I have hesitated to write this letter.  The breach between our two families has been so severe and so firmly prosecuted on the part of my grandfather, Mr Harold Blythe, that any attempt to encroach on your acquaintance at this late stage must surely cause pain, as well as appearing hopelessly interested.
> 
> Our two mothers were sisters, and as our mutual grandfather has recently passed away, I feel that I may write to you without failing the bounds of filial piety.  When I executed his estate I found some papers belonging to your mother, my Aunt Chawleigh, and also there is a small miniature, finely painted, which I feel you may have some interest in.
> 
> If it should please you to receive these in person, I will be in London in the month of January to engage in some business for my parishioners and would be happy to oblige; if it should be inconvenient for you to receive a call, please advise and I will furnish you them by post.
> 
> Please accept my belated felicitations on the occasion of your marriage and the birth of your son.
> 
> Yrs obdtly,
> 
> James Blythe

Jenny sat very still after she had read it, everything in her carriage the beautiful deportment hard won from her private seminary.

“We are leaving for Fontley in two days,” Adam said mock casually, “I could write him, in all truth, that we will be out of town in January.”

“It is very lonely being an only child,” Jenny said quietly.  “You with your sisters and, and your brother Stephen, I don’t think you can really know.”

He sat across from her and took her hands, which were very cold.  “My little goose.  You have a family.  There is no obligation on you to acknowledge relatives who refused to know your mother.”

“Are you ashamed of them?”

He bumped his forehead against hers.  “You know I am not.  Is this boy the son of your Aunt Eliza?  The one who gave you a Christmas present of bon bons and wore that great black velvet cloak when she visited?”

“I don’t know.  Maybe.  Then it’s decided.  Nurse will bring Giles to London.  We stay for Christmas.”

***

On the appointed day, at one minute past the appointed hour, the Lyntons opened their home to a black robed parson beneath a broad brimmed hat, with the round soft complexion of a cherub.

Jenny sat frozen in her morning room, embroidering a linen handkerchief with exquisitely tiny stitches that necessitated her full attention, and it was left to Adam to stand the pretty.

“I have a curacy in Portsmouth,” the Reverend replied to a veiled question, “and very good prospects of a living there in a few years’ time.”

Adam quirked an eyebrow, noticing the slightly emphasis the curate had placed on the word ‘good.’

“I am no Mr Collins, I assure you,” Dr Blythe added, glancing at the handsomely bound copy of _Persuasion_ lying on the small table.

“Do you read novels?” Jenny asked.

“Yes,” he laughed, “the young lady I am attached to is a great reader, as are many of the young women in my parish.  It helps to keep up on the competition.”

“And do you like _Pride and Prejudice_ then?”  There was a small challenge in her eyes.

“I like the ending.  Everyone receives better than they deserve, by the grace of the author.  Mr Collins… let us just say that he had the good fortune to marry a woman of sense, and pray that he goes on from there.”

“Was your pride not piqued?” Adam asked curiously.

“I am well aware that in the play, and also in the novel, a curate is a comical thing.  It is a source of great humility to me.  And that awful Mr Elton in _Emma_ , to cut a young lady in need of a dancing partner—what a dreadfully lost soul.  But _Persuasion_ ,” he nodded at the leather bound volume, “I am enjoying very much.  I have just now reached Lyme, and the threat to our hero’s romantic fortunes of the poetic Captain Benwick.  I can foresee a major rival in this devotee of bad poetry and my young lady, who is normally very good hearted, _will not_ tell me how it ends.”

“Oh pooh,” Jenny announced frostily.  “Captain Wentworth is obviously trying to set Anne up with someone kindly.  He knows that she turned down Charles Musgrove because he wasn’t bookish enough, so he introduces her to his friend Benwick who is gloomily obsessed over bad poetry.  Or good poetry as well, I suppose,” she added doubtfully.

Dr Blythe laughed.  “We shall both have to find out by reading.  The agony of one’s first time.”

Jenny twisted the scrap of linen she had been embroidering, then set it aside and rang the bell.  To the butler she advised: “Please ask Nurse to bring Giles down from the nursery.  He will want to meet his cousin.”

“I won’t ask for any favours,” the curate said bluntly half an hour later, as he donned his hat at the door.  Jenny’s plain speaking must come from more than the Chawleigh bloodline, Adam realised suddenly.  “Or hang off your sleeve begging for influence.  It is easier, by far, to extend the olive branch when one can say in honesty that one is not in want.”

“I’ve met few in my life who didn’t want anything,” Adam challenged with his own bluntness.

“Oh, pho, a little bit of blunt will never go amiss.  But I have my own pride and my own vision of greatness and the secular world shall not provide it.  No, I shan’t ask for favours, but—”  The curate’s pale eyes stood out against his long dark lashes, and his befreckled skin was pale beneath the broad black rim of his hat, “you and your wife will always be welcome guests in my home, my Lord.  And if there is anything, any way in which I may be of service to your wife, please advise me.  There is a family debt that is hard to repay.”

Away from the door, his wife was slowly dealing out the letters, their scarlet seals uncorrupted, the quality of the folded papers from poorly sized coarse pages to the smooth luxury of hot-pressed paper telling its own story of her parents’ financial life.  One final letter, sealed close with a careless smudge of black sealing wax, its address in the blunt hand of Jonathan Chawleigh, was the final tolling bell of the story.  Jenny’s small mouth was set in a hard line and when she had laid out the papers she coughed once, hard.  She set the notebook and miniature portrait at the bottom of her array.  “My grandfather wouldn’t even open them,” she said in a small voice.  Adam sat on the couch next to her and cradled her head against his shoulder.  “Oh, my Jenny.  No child of ours shall ever be disowned, no, never, my sweet.  Not even should they run away to be a pirate or engage in a thriving stage career with their dreadful Aunt Lydia.”

She laughed once, bleakly, but let herself be comforted.

***

Viscount Lynton saw the little Reverend once more before the man departed London.  Dr Blythe was handing Jenny out of the carriage as the snow fell around them, and Adam took his wife’s hand and settled it firmly in the crook of his arm as he himself alighted from the hackney bringing him back from his agent’s offices.

“Hello again, Lord Lynton, I hope I find you well.”

“You do, indeed.”  He looked a question at Jenny.

“Mr Blythe has been taking me to a public lecture.  Would you like to come in for some tea, James?  I would like it very much.”

“Alas, Lady Lynton, I have some commissions to make today before I return to my parish.  But I very much enjoyed the outing.  Fare you well, my Lady.”

When Adam had settled his wife inside, she chattered to him comfortably about the trip they had made to a public lecture by the good Thomas Telford and his description of the calculations that went into producing his great Scottish bridges.

“Oh, poor Jenny,” Adam told her.  “It must have been very dull for you.  It was generous of you to spend some time with your cousin, even if a lecture was the only thing available to you.”

“I wanted to go,” she said primly.  She added in a dark voice, “ _Father_ refused to take me.  He has the most peculiar notions about what things are not ladylike.  As do you.  Thank goodness for cousins.  I will get him to take me out next time he is in London.”

Adam decided to cede the battle.

***

It was almost February when Adam returned to Fontley, from urgent business in Yorkshire that had kept him a full week later than promised, and with the sour knowledge that he would have to go back to London soon to take his place in Parliament.

The only remittance on his debt of delayed travel on sodden roads was the knowledge that he had returned early enough in the day that his son and heir, neatly packaged into a skeleton suit, could heroically tackle him mere moments after he had descended from his chaise.  He swung Giles through the air, laughing.  “Bigger every day, Honourable Giles!”  The little boy crowed at him and tugged on his arm to drag him bodily to his latest fascination, a fallen willow and the wealth of curled up insects and worms to be found in the earth torn up by the roots.  The trunk made a capital bridge across a little stream, and he spent an hour helping the little boy studiously progress back and forth across his viaduct, before the boy’s nurse discovered them both and chased the delinquents in from the cold.

Cowed, he slunk into Fontley where he was greeted by his mock frowning wife who told him to clean up for dinner.  But she smiled at him over her shoulder as she hustled Giles up the stairs and he knew he was forgiven.

Later, in the library:

“I’ll show you something I found in the attic,” Jenny said, looking flushed and pleased.

Set up near the hearth in the library was a spinning wheel, old, but with its darkened wood oiled until it gleamed.

“Mrs Dawson says that it was once your grandmother’s,” she said proudly.  “She says her family was too fine to use such a thing on their own account, but Martha was taught by her own Mama and has shown me.  It is a thing I can amuse myself with when the rain is heavy and I want to rest my eyes from white work, or, or, reading,” she added.

“Well,” said Adam.  “ _Well._ ”  He knelt and traced its lineaments with his hands.  “I remember _this._   Grandmother used to spin the merino for our stockings with it, and knit them.  I remember she used to tell us fairy stories by the fire while she worked this.  And Mousie—Mousie Venables that is, she was my foster-mamma when I was but a baby, she had a spinning wheel of a different sort.  By the hearth.”  He blinked in sudden memory of a dim cottage and warm fire, the swaying woman turning the wheel, “it is as graceful as a minuet to watch, my Jenny, you’ll see.  But no pricking your fingers on the spindle, mind,” he teased.

“I won’t,” Jenny blushed.  “Father came on a visit while you were away.  “He is inspecting some concerns he might invest in in Sheffield and he wanted to look at all the windmills you have—sorry, that is, not _mills_.  All the pumps you have for drainage.  He is all full of grand schemes for putting in steam pumps and I told him no because you had your own plans, but _that_ ,” she added, as she set the wheel to spinning and gathered a hank of wool to twist between her fingers, “that is a lie for I have made plans of my own.  For the canal, and the cut that will drain into it.  That is, I was hoping you would have a look at them for me, and tell me what you think.”  Her eyes darted briefly at a thick roll of papers that were neatly rolled up on the desk she used to keep accounts.

Adam smiled.  His wife’s shyness about Fontley had been slowly melting away as thick pond ice covering a green willow branch, ready to spring up with the sun.  He let her chatter away happily about head loss and aqueducts and the books she had been reading about the newest engineering and the clever young man she had found in London to advise on it.  When she allowed herself to be, he thought, she was fully as technically minded as the Elder Chawleigh; he noted the satisfaction in her voice as she explained the best place to make a cut and which type of pump would be more suitable.  All that time learning about Chinese porcelain to please her father, and farming to please him, and romantic poetry to please her school friends, and she had now found a passion of her own.  It made sense, he supposed.  A virtuoso housewife, she had so thoroughly set the house of Fontley to her liking in her first pregnancy, it really stood to reason that in the second her nesting impulse would spread to the surrounding lands.  “I will show you the prototype I had built tomorrow and you will understand.  And—that is, if you would…”

“Yes?” Adam asked, wondering what so great a monument held up her flow of words.

“I was wondering, that is if you please, I have been saving the second volume of _Persuasion_ for your return.  That is, if it would please you—”  In the candlelight, her face was suffused with a fierce blush.

Adam laughed at her, and caressed he cheek lightly as he moved to collect the little volume from the table.  “Oh, my poor Jenny, and your reprobate husband has been late home _again._ That was a noble sacrifice indeed.”  He settled back into his comfortable chair and let her take up her thread again while he found his place at the dramatic departure of Captain Wentworth from the musical evening.  It was followed by the dissection of the musicale the night before and the teased revelation of the designing Mr Eliot’s true character.  It tickled him reading the revelations brought out one by one by the interests of Mrs Smith. 

He paused at the casual dismissal of the deceased Mrs Eliot: the daughter of a grazier, and grandchild of a butcher, to be looked down on despite her well enough education.  “Would you like me to keep on reading?” he asked quietly, feeling a little embarrassed of the weight that people attached to his breeding and his bloodline, that he himself placed on it.  This Miss Austen could make exceptions for the navy, and sometimes farmers if they tried hard enough, but even she had her limits.

“Yes, I do,” his wife told him firmly.

And so the book carried on, all the busyness about card parties, and invitations and then, all of a sudden, a heartfelt speech about love holding on when all hope is gone.  And at last hope, between two people too full of feeling to speak openly, but who needs must use proxies and letters.  To finish, as in a good lawyer’s settlement, Miss Austen had laid out an ending in which all received as they deserved and the gentle Anne became a sailor’s wife.

Adam read the final words and let the library be filled with the homely sound of ticking clock and crackling fire.  The room was warm and cosy, the wine-coloured curtains supporting all, the K’ang‑hsi bowl glowed quietly in its corner.  A little across from him, his small homely wife had let the spinning wheel cease and was staring blankly at a book filled wall, tears streaming down her face.

Once, Adam might have chosen the way of good breeding and quietly pretended not to see until his wife had had time to collect herself.  But he was pleased to say that the best of Chawleigh-brass had rubbed off on him, and he moved to the loveseat next to Jenny and gently rubbed her back.  “Now, now, my little goose, whatever is to do?”

She flung her arms around his neck and buried her face in his chest, her body wracked with sobs as violent as ever betook his two-year old son and heir.  “He loves her!” she raised her face and howled.  “He really loves her!”

Adam wrapped his arms around his darling wife and kissed her fine brown hair.  “Of course he loves her, my darling Jenny, of course he does.”

***

The next morning, the Lyntons drove out in the gig so that Jenny could show him the place she thought best to make a cut, and talk it over with the other landowners who would reap the benefits.  At the Market Deeping road, Adam gentle covered his hand over hers to help with the tricky turn and his Jenny glanced at him with a sunny smile.

Adam grinned back.

**Author's Note:**

> “but they are opening Parliament in January this year“: Yes, the specific dates in which the British Parliament opened are in fact internet searchable. Yes, really. http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1790-1820/parliament/1812
> 
> “but the baroque splendour and lush bodies of the Pope’s palace in Rome, papal corruption, incense, and all”: I wanted to throw in a reference to the Venus of Willendorf, but it hasn’t been found yet. Damn you, historical accuracy!!!1!11!
> 
> “Set up near the hearth in the parlour was a spinning wheel”: The details of the spinning wheel and the practice of fostering out babies are from a memoir by Austen’s nephew, J. E. Austen-Leigh, recounting what life was like in his youth and his Aunt’s day to the young whippersnappers of 1870ish. Spinning wheels in the finer houses were common, just as they were necessary in the poorer, and men and women of the gentry did a lot more for themselves in terms of personal care and cooking than by Austen-Leigh’s day – I think this is related to the increasing number of people available to be domestic staff (as well as standing armies and factory workers), in large part brought about by the Great British Agricultural Revolution that Adam is participating in. The humble turnip has a lot of history resting on its shoulders.
> 
> The draining of the fens and the rise of Norfolk four course rotation turned out to be so fascinating that I kept on getting distracted in ‘research’, but here is a short summary of both: http://www.greatfen.org.uk/heritage/drained-fens, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolution
> 
> I mention Thomas Telford, one of the great civil engineer of the early 19th C, mostly for colour. I couldn’t find any names of books he’d written, so made one up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Telford  
> 


End file.
